Any discussion about GNOME vs. KDE is sure to end in tears. It's basically impossible to discuss which of these two Free desktop environments is better than the other, mostly because they cater to different types of people, with different needs and expectatotions. As such, Bruce Byfield decided to look at the two platforms from a different perspective: if we consider their developmental processes, which of the two is most likely to be more successful in the coming years?

Well, the mac OS X model is a lot like the KDE one - mac OS X was a complete rewrite of Mac OS 9, even more so than KDE 4 was a rewrite of KDE 3. Since then they did incremental but often still strong and backwards incompattible improvements. Again, KDE will be even more conservative than Mac OS X in this regard, as the KDE 4 series won't break backwards compatibility and will be around for at many years, like KDE 3 was (over 6 years stable API).